Level 4: community
We learn how to deal with non competitive relationships. Community building has to do with “securities” and “progress” for the participants. A community can provide protection but also new possibilities for growth and competition due to differences in size and abilities. A community introduces the complexity of self awareness, relationships, co-creation and progress. Growth, competition and adaptability applies to communities too just like individuals yet they develop in different ways depending on the purpose and size of the combinations.

The diversity has grown very large and forms a new, modern type of dynamics. Communities of the same type tend to clash in competition (eg business or countries) or search the diplomatic interaction, for instance between communities within a community. It can get as complex as we want and shows the same natural dynamics as individual identities. On a regional level we often refer to this as “the system” (the economic system, law system, political system, the competitive system, etc).

At the level of consciousness of the human being we can reflect about us within communities or dealing with communities from an outside perspective. Within the community we are participants and do this for a reason. Outside the community we use it as an instrument just like a football player uses a ball or a carpenter a hammer. It are two different levels of perception and consciousness.

When we look at society we see that the basic tradition of humankind to build communities has always been the bonding between man and woman to form a family. We are capable of living the bondage individually (husband, wife, parent, son, daughter, grandparent, etc) and as a whole (family). In other communities this does not work like that. It is often either-or.

The many social, production, combat, religious, political, etc types of communities have a long evolutionary history too but shorter of course than our family based experience. We call these larger community complexities the “system complexity” which tends to live a life of its own. To make it even more complex we created a parallel universe to connect these human communities and call it “economics”. This abstract term has as many meanings as our consciousness and is often confused with it, refering to money as the spirituality of community development.

At this level of awareness we find people who develop a very special nature to use community building out of self interest. They manipulate reality in such a way that only they benefit. Think of the banking families around the world that have created an enormous imperium around money which provides them with an enormous amount of power as long as we attach value to money and create systems based on the invention. The same occurs with other abstract systems around the spiritual bondage among people. Banks work like religions. Money is a system of debt and religion too. Both demand loyalty to the system in exchange for safety through absolution and securities like food, shelter, luxury, healthcare, peace of mind, the eternal life, etc.

The day we put our energy in creating other types of relationships instead of property and debt the entire old money or belief system collapses and is replaced by something new. Power of control is hence extremely relative to the surroundings we build for ourselves. One minor change (s.a. giving a sense of value to tokens instead of money, or knowledge instead of belief) can change everything.

Most people are not aware of this. They act self aware about their daily needs of food, shelter, clothing, etc but have no perception of the overall reality, just some fragmented pieces and interpretation. We place our trust in the community and offer our loyalty as long as we gets what is needed in our daily existence.

Consciousness is not built when daily needs are served, it is built when communities do not serve in the daily needs anymore and one falls back into reflection and awareness through purpose driven knowledge building and usage.

Then sustainable leadership appears at random among the individual people that step out of the old world to produce the new values that become the basis of new community creation. The complexity simplifies just to become complex again based on different values.